(a) I didn’t get enough sleep last night.
(b) I am super excited to start the day.

Most people, whether they are conscious of it or not, think (a) “I didn’t get enough sleep last night” as they hit the snooze button for eight more minutes of sleep. In fact, it’s a thought like this that causes an action of inaction which keeps you staying in bed, missing your workout, and being late to work.

Further, this thought of “not enough” is the first in a slew of negative, scarcity thoughts that continue all day long, usually ending with “I haven’t gotten enough done today” as they hit the pillow to go to sleep at night.

Sound familiar?

Psychologists call it negativity bias, the notion supported by research that we are wired to focus on potential threats, the “what if something bad will happen next” type of thought that has an adaptive purpose in the era of survival. (Think saber tooth tiger potentially around the next corner in the woods.)

But for those of us looking to thrive, we can learn to recondition our often default thinking onto a more positive path, thereby influencing our energy, immunity, sleep, and even success. (Think Olympic athlete as she prepares to go for the gold.)

Here’s where mindfulness comes in.

Mindfulness is “A mental state of calm awareness of the present moment, marked by acceptance, openness and curiosity toward your thoughts and feelings, rather than judgments of them,” according to the consensual definition.

When you recognize scarcity thinking, you may think:

(a) There you go again, you negative nelly.
(b) Isn’t that fascinating that I am so conditioned. Thankfully, I can rewire.

This awareness of the present moment is what mindfulness is all about. To that end, mindfulness is a way of being in the world. It’s not yet another way to improve yourself, not another item for your to-do list, and not just meditation. No one is exempt from doing the work to develop a mindfulness muscle. It takes practice.

Learn to knit

Dr. Ellen Langer, the first woman to be granted tenure in the Harvard Psychology Department, has been studying mindfulness since the 1970s. One book called Counterclockwise highlights some of her research that shows mindfulness can help us increase vitality and even reverse the aging process.

Langer suggests we take up a creative class that can bring out attention to detail as we learn a skill (like painting or knitting) which focuses our attention in a particular way and for a sustained period of time where we base one step on the previous step, thereby adapting what comes in the present moment to what will happen next.

She says, “When people are mindful, they are open to generating new ways of looking at the world and are not controlled by routines and habitual ways of observing . . . the simple process of actively drawing distinctions.”

Building mindfulness

Our lives are written so by routine. When was the last time you took a new route to work in the morning?

I encourage clients to take mindful walks. The next time you walk to the coffee shop, put your cellphone away and focus on feeling the full strides of your feet on the ground. Or, do the dishes mindfully. Instead of thinking about what you “should have done earlier” or what you “need to do next,” just be with the dish for a minute and feel the full sensations of warm water suds on your hands. These types of slight shifts in how you normally run on default mode will strengthen your mindfulness muscle.

Louis practicing meditation

It’s true – with extensive research to back it up – that meditation is a great practice to build mindfulness for the same reasons it focuses our attention. If you think you don’t know how to meditate, you can learn and if you think you don’t have ten minutes a day to meditate, then you need twenty.

It’s a simple concept: we construct our reality (our experience of the world) in large part by where we put our limited attention. (How many of you feel a little Attention-Deficit-Disordered (ADD) these days?) More often than we recognize, we can make choices consciously and intentionally thereby getting more of what we want in life: more health, more wealth, specifically:

Or, how about peace? Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Through mindfulness, we can learn to live in the present moment instead of in the past and in the future. Dwelling in the present moment is the only way to truly develop peace, both in one’s self and in the world.”

The world needs peace right now. The world needs you to increase your mindfulness. So, thank you for practicing and building your mindfulness muscle. (But don’t say “no problem” because that ain’t mindful, according to John Amodeo.)

When the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, take a slow and low cleansing breath and remember to express gratitude for another day to be alive.

Author’s Note: Louis Alloro is a founding partner at The Flourishing Center and Director of the Philadelphia cohort of the 6-month Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) program that will begin in March. Other CAPP cohorts in NYC and San Francisco with an executive education model that allows you to travel in from out of town. For more information, visit Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology.

Jeremy McCarthy ended his great review of Jonathan Haidt’s new book, The Righteous Mind by exploring Haidt’s statement, “Morality binds and blinds.” This encapsulates both a challenge and an opportunity. We blindly follow our moral instincts; the foundations are hard to shake even in the presence of rational countervailing reasons. But morality also brings people together with others who hold similar values. While there is no single way to define or describe a moral life, we all have the ability to transcend self-interest, albeit in different ways, and to contribute to the greater good of our own communities.

So, how do we transcend self-interest and contribute to the greater good of our own communities? I had the opportunity to speak with Jonathan Haidt, newly appointed professor of ethical leadership at the NYU Stern School of Business. I asked him for practical applications of his Moral Foundations Theory, in particular, how I, as a SOcial-eMOtional leader, can apply the theory with:

My family (where some have politics very different from mine)

My consulting work with businesses (where morality is sometimes a dirty word)

My work in community organizations (where many turn a blind eye to immoral behavior)

Our positive psychology community (where it’s most important we walk the talk)

Here’s what he said . . .

For (my) family

Family Dinner

Haidt suggested that we attend to relationships first. “Put the elephant at ease before addressing the rider.”

I can look for things that the other side is right about, though it is hard to do, because my own morality is like a guard dog preventing me from seeing that they may actually be right. For example, I could say, “Yes, sometimes bureaucratic government agencies are difficult to deal with,” or, “You’re right, too much entitlement spending is going to ruin us. What can we do about it?” Stay open. Inquire. Don’t advocate.

Humans have evolved towards communion to overcome solitude. We need to build high quality connections with one another. In the book, Haidt explained that not long ago, American politicians elected to Congress would move their families to Washington, DC, where the families would come to know one another. This is not the case anymore as Congress people tend to fly in on Sundays and leave on Thursdays. Is it any wonder partisanship is problematic? We need to connect and intentionally build our tribes.

Listening to all points of view

For Businesses

Many disastrous business decisions are made from overconfidence plus the confirmation bias, that is, tending to see only things that confirm previously held views. If you understand the flaws of human reasoning, you understand that better reasoning is possible with co-creation. SOcial-eMOtional (SOMO) leaders set up a culture where it’s expected for people to point out flawed thinking. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman recommends asking the people in a group to write down their opinions and hand them in to be read out loud. That way they aren’t swayed by the first people to speak up or by the loudest voices.

Haidt referred to the teachings of Glaucon, Plato’s older brother: people are more concerned about reputations than they are about money. “You want to set up any organization so that peoples’ reputations are on the line. People will suffer if they do bad things and revel in the glory if they do good things,” he said. In modern times we don’t want people to feel shame, “but I suspect that putting more attention on reputational outcomes would be helpful.” Doing so may minimize backstabbing and deception.

Dancing together

For Community Groups

Many people operate from a scarcity mindset, where for me to win, you need to lose. In community settings, it is also common for people to turn a blind eye when witnessing immoral behavior. Perhaps this is a “protection of the tribe” mechanism, but ultimately it separates people from what’s real.

Referring to his metaphor of humans as hive creatures, Haidt reminded me that we are 10% bee, not 100% bee. While we don’t want to turn everything into a hive, occasionally setting up events to have people move in synchrony can increase their willingness to act for the group.

Listening to Music Together

This reminds me of Cleveland’s Wade Oval Wednesdays, where the community comes together to listen to music, eat food, and dance under the summer night sky. Events like this bind us and help us build social capital, which produces trust. Trust is a crucial ingredient to understanding one another and moving forward.

“You can’t stick ethics into anyone’s head,” Haidt said. Choosing to have an appreciation of difference means seeing them as yin/yang and not good/evil. To earmark another as evil eliminates any space for growth.

For our Positive Psychology Community

The darker side of Haidt’s book shows that we are all flawed hypocrites (do as I say, not as I do). We can each work on being more aware that we are not always right. If we do, people are less likely to perceive our efforts to enroll them into more positive paradigm as threats. Then they will be more inclined to be open to the science that shows what many ancient traditions have taught all along: be good, do good, expect good of others.

Haidt said that he considers himself a social, moral, cultural, and positive psychologist. He wondered if we might do a better job of being open to conservatives in our community. “Are we listening to them? Is the field any way hostile or insensitive? Perhaps what they have to say are things we just literally can’t see,” he said.

FAIRFAX, VA – On 13 April 2012, George Mason University held its third annual conference on the intersection of resilience, well-being, leadership, and strengths. This year’s theme, Living and Leading with Resilience, attracted a sold-out crowd eager to learn from researchers and practitioners such as Rick Hanson, Chris Peterson, Sarah Pressman (who did those cool studies on psychologists’ biographies to find out that more positive texts correlated with 7 years more life), and Kim Cameron from the University of Michigan Positive Organizational Scholarship Center.

Emotional Alchemy

Todd Kashdan

I’ll start with the ending, a closing keynote by Todd Kashdan, Mason professor, psychologist, and senior scientist at the Center for Consciousness and Transformation. Kashdan adds a vertical dimension to the discussion, taking business-as-usual and giving it depth.

“It’s time we dip outside the field of what we call positive psychology into related, scientifically-informed disciplines,” he urged.

Kashdan spoke of a concept he calls emotional alchemy as a way to build emotional intelligence, a skill he says we are conditioned to believe we finished learning in kindergarten. His definition of social anxiety is our need to belong gone awry, plus an avoidance-focused lifestyle that results in an erosion of positive experiences.

Struggling Well

Chris Peterson and Nansook Park gave the lunchtime keynote and spoke of resilience as “struggling well.” As an example of emotional alchemy that takes us away from the old “bounce back using your own boot straps” mentality and gives us permission to be human, they closed with the following video, showing Derek Redmond achieving real-time resilience with the help of his father.

Rick Hanson

Brain and Mind are Connected

Rick Hanson’s talk, “Taking in the Good,” addressed the notion of self-directed neuroplasticity: changing the mind to change the brain to change the mind. Our minds are our experience (thinking, feeling, sensing), and our brains are the organismal totality of our nervous systems.

A simple experience of focusing attention on the feeling (not just the thought) of something good has enormous impact, activating the insula, a part of our brains used for knowing ourselves and having empathy for others. Focusing this way has been shown to lessen cortical thinning, thus reducing the cognitive decline that often comes with aging.

Nance Lucas (L), Beth Cabrera, & Pam Patterson (R)

Practical Applications

The conference included many sessions on the practical applications of positive psychology in the world, including Beth Cabrera’s session on good transitions, secrets of resilient entrepreneurs, and positive leadership strategies. Beth Cabrera is a positive psychology practitioner and wife of Angel Cabrera, incoming president of George Mason University.

I gave a talk on SOcial-eMOtional Leadership, an intervention I’m facilitating in partnership with the Center for Consciousness and Transformation (CCT). I was delighted to be joined at the conference by one of the first partners of SOMO Cleveland, Adele DiMarco-Kious.

Co-Chairs of MasonLeads, Nance Lucas (Dean, New Century College and Interim Director of CCT) and Pam Patterson (Asst. Vice President, University Life and Dean of Students) are thrilled with this year’s turnout. “A magical day of inquiry, scholarship, and practice,” Patterson says.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. –Albert Einstein

People are talking about Inception, a new film by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento) which Warner Brothers describes as a “contemporary sci-fi actioner set within the architecture of the mind.”

I’ve been describing the film as a mind trip, and since seeing it days ago, I’ve wondered for myself the questions that film poses: What’s really real? What’s created as an illusion of my subconscious mind? Or, better yet, what’s co-created in our collective (un)conscious?

The film explores the phenomenon of ideas. Where do they start? How are they influenced? Can we extract ideas from each other, and when we do, to whom do they belong? Can we cause others to incept (take in) ideas by influencing them to think what we want them to think? The film shows how these powers can be used for good as well as evil.

Talking about Positive Psychology

When I give talks on positive psychology, I usually start by saying, “It’s about feeling good and it’s way more than just thinking positively.” Like most of my colleagues, I underscore the science and ask, “Who doesn’t want increased well-being, happiness, and success – especially now that we have evidenced-based ways to increase these capacities?”

Einstein as teacher

Then I often cite Albert Einstein, one of the most eminent scientists of our times, a man who devised the theory of relativity – the father of modern physics and the study of time-space reality, a concept that the film takes on quite poignantly.

But when I think about Einstein as the physicist, I wouldn’t necessarily expect him to have said this:

There are two ways you can look at the world: One as if nothing were a miracle, the other as if everything were a miracle.

We have choices

Here, Einstein suggests something quite important: the way we see the world around us is our choice.

Last week on my blog, I wrote about some of the “A ha!” moments in my life, including one that occurred when I lost my brother to suicide. He was 19; I was 12. I remember where I was standing that afternoon, on the edge of our driveway in Harrington Park, NJ, just as the sun was setting, when the thought came through my head, “There is learning in this for all of us; there will be transcendence and meaning.” I have lived from that place since, turning helpless depression into hopeful optimism, regaining my locus of control.

As Seligman argues in his research on explanatory style, pessimistic people look at good things that happen to them as luck and optimistic people look at those same events as opportunities they themselves helped create. Just as Einstein says, how we think (miracles or none?) is our choice. What story do you tell?

When we are not intentional in our thinking, life brings us things from our dark subconscious, whether we consciously want it or not. Jonathan Haidt would say that the elephant overtakes the rider. When we don’t challenge ourselves on our own or take our own risks, life brings its own stretch goals to us. Conscious connection to what we’re creating and positive thoughts around that connection are key in keeping it real. One of the scenes in the movie even says, “It is positive emotion that makes a dream real.”

Bouncing Between Dream and Reality

Inception bounces between dream and reality in a way that reminds me of schizophrenia, a mental illness characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking, of contact with reality, and of emotional responsiveness.

I live in New York City and see schizophrenic people talking to themselves all the time. No, they are not on their wireless Bluetooth devices! I always wonder, to what degree are we all a little schizophrenic? A little anxious? A little depressed at times?

Psychology is the study of how we think and behave. How we think influences how we feel which effects how we (inter)act. Positive psychology does not discount negative emotion, but it certainly questions where we choose to sit (or start): in the positive story of what happened / what can happen – or the negative? We know there is a human negativity bias.

Russ Ackoff, the late thought leader on systems thinking shows that more than 80% of the time, a problem in a system is not solved in the same place it was created. Inception raises the idea that perhaps we’re trying to change things in the wrong dimension – we can change the past, the future, and the present by changing the story we choose to tell ourselves about what’s real. Where do we choose to focus our attention?

Einstein statue

For me, Inception ends with as many questions it starts with, but I love that: Challenge my thinking! Give us the strength of curiosity to build off what we collectively know to be true and enable our own positive evolution. While it’s an inside job, individual progress contributes to the sum of our parts, generally leading to collective good. But remember what Einstein also says:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Authors note: Just spent a week training UK teachers to learn resiliency and positive psychology – a magical experience. If you know of any school communities that would like to kick off the new year trying something different, something new, something sane, email me. We’ll find funding in untraditional ways!

References

The movie, Inception by Warner Brothers Pictures. Not available in DVD yet, but you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available.

I want to travel to Pandora, the fictional planet depicted in Avatar. I saw James Cameron’s newest film that has rocked box offices since its release in December on I-MAX 3-D and have since been urging friends to run, not walk, to see this movie. The message inherent in the panoramic view is profoundly positive and especially relevant to our world today.

The film is set in the year 2154 on Pandora, a faraway moon place where the indigenous Na’vi people roam. The film’s title refers to the genetically engineered Na’vi bodies used by the film’s human characters to interact with the Na’vi. In the film, some humans are interested in mining Pandora’s reserves of a precious mineral called unobtanium. Human greed threatens the continued existence of the Na’vi and the Pandoran ecosystem. Avatars that are part-Na’vi and part-human are created to cohabit with the Na’vi in order gain their trust.

According to Hindu mythology, an avatar is the personification of a god. The more modern Urban Dictionary, defines avatars as computerized images representing a person, like the icon you create and use when playing Nintendo Wii. Avatars resemble real human form, but are digitized.

The perceived need to have Na’vi Avatars exemplifies the social psychological research on own-race bias, the tendency of humans to gravitate towards those who look like them. Research by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues shows that positive emotions reduce own-race bias: people with higher levels of positive emotion see more similarities and fewer differences. When we open ourselves up to the wonders of the universe, we see more wonders. Then we can see ourselves as wonders. It feels good to be seen.

“I see you”

Louis with an Avatar Face

The Na’vi use “I see you!” as token of love and respect, signifying knowledge, empathy, and compassion. But being seen requires we let ourselves be seen – a conscious choice to be open and vulnerable. This relates to Carol Dweck’s research on mindset: the kids who choose harder puzzles are open to the fact that they may not be able to complete them. They take the risk anyway. They have faith in themselves (in our lingo, this is self-efficacy). The Na’vi people exemplify this faith, not only in themselves, but in the universe as well. Perhaps this mindset stems from a self-actualization and self-love that is built with self-regulation over time. Notice the emphasis on self.

But not too much emphasis. In the film, we see the hubris of some of the film’s human characters who insist it’s okay to invade and to take what belongs to the other. “To fight terror, we need terror,” says Colonel Miles Quaritch (played by Stephen Lang), the leader of the security forces. In the end, goodness prevails as Jake (played by Sam Worthington) and Augustine (played by Sigourney Weaver) build a true collaboration with the Na’vi people – not an easy task – but nonetheless a true win-win, as described by Robert Wright’s history of social evolution, Nonzero.

Your Cup is Too Full “Your cup is too full,” says Mo’at (played by C. C. H. Pounder), a shaman who is also the mother of Neytiri (played by Zoe Saldana). Mo’at encourages her daughter to teach Jake the ways of the Na’vi people. “My cup is empty,” Jake pleads as if to suggest that he is open and willing to learn. This spirit of learning is at the heart of the movie, and also at the core of positive psychology. Fredrickson’s Broaden and Build Theory is essentially a learning theory. Positive emotions put us in spaces that allow for learning, for seeing things anew, for opening, for growing.

Interconnectedness
Positive emotions happen in social situations. The film demonstrates the power of interconnectedness. One of the most fascinating scenes shows hundreds of Na’vi people linked together physically, arm to arm, with a brilliant white light radiating between them. This same light is shown throughout the planet’s natural world, as if to suggest a oneness, a peace, and the positive evolution inherent in the interconnectedness of all beings. It is energy giving.

I hypothesize this interconnectedness requires trust. Trust comes from a willingness to be vulnerable and from faith (the Na’vi people have this). Faith comes from appreciating the wonders of the universe. The wonders of the universe come from seeing and being seen. Seeing and being seen take intention, mindfulness, risk, and yes, love.

The Message is For Us
Avatar is real-life, not just a sci-fi epic, if you’re open to seeing it that way. Ultimately, this is what positive psychology is about for me – being willing to see things in different and perhaps more positive ways. It is a mindset that can be built consciously, over time by challenging old habits of thinking, speaking, doing, and ultimately, of feeling.

Hey look, the truth is that I’m working on this process, myself. Maybe you are too? Perhaps then, we’ll co-create the brilliance of Pandora right here within the miraculous beauty of our own planet, mother Earth.

How Avatar is relevant today ~ Click here to watch Wade Davis’ TED Talk on indigenous cultures and why it’s important we save both the biosphere and ethnosphere.

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